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  • Editor’s Foreword
  • Karen F. Gracy

In trying to describe what exactly constitutes the field of moving image archiving, I sometimes resort to the overused word interdisciplinary, because we often bring the knowledge of multiple disciplines together to work on the common problem of caring for the world's audiovisual heritage. Although our roots can most definitely be found in the nurturing soil of media history and theory, we have successfully grafted numerous branches onto our tree, including archival and museum studies, library science, art history, and conservation.

Though we often borrow ideas, methods, and practices from one of these source disciplines, in the process of adapting them to the unique environment of moving images we often find them unsuitable for our own applications. The difficulties may exist in the physical or aesthetic qualities of moving image material itself, as audiovisual documents carry visual and aural information in a complex manner that is resistant to the type of analysis or categorization to which textual matter lends itself. For example, the challenge of digitizing analog audiovisual material to create surrogates that may stand for the original is much more complex than producing digital versions of most printed texts. Although one may say that there are now robust, reliable standards for the digitization of text, one cannot make the same case for moving images at this time.

Complications may also be found in external factors unique to the moving image archival environment, such as political or economic issues that influence how we preserve or provide access to such material. Audiovisual archives often face hostile political environments that blunt efforts to protect material. Copyright restrictions for audiovisual material often trap film and video materials in legal purgatories from which archives [End Page vi] cannot rescue them. Furthermore, economic realities often make their own imperatives. In Sam Kula's work on the appraisal of archival moving images, he devotes a chapter to monetary appraisal.1 Archivists working in other environments deliberately do not engage in this practice, as it is considered a conflict of interest with their primary responsibility, that is, to assess the archival value of material. Yet in the moving image world, the fair market value of material often impinges upon archival value—decisions must take into account both assessments. Truth be known, the high cost of preservation work often forces archives, particularly smaller archives with miniscule budgets for audiovisual preservation, to preserve material that has proven to generate licensing revenue through user demand, rather than prioritizing exclusively by archival value. Should our appraisal models formally incorporate such economic concerns? If so, then we diverge significantly from the archival party line.

As my brief example above shows, when we try to apply the concepts of a related discipline to our own work, we must test their fit for our own needs. In doing so, we make strides in fashioning our own histories, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies for practice. In this issue, several of the articles wrestle with the fit of tried-and-true models in the moving image archiving environment. Our first essay, "Framers of the Kept: Against the Grain Appraisal of Ephemeral Moving Images," finds author Timothy Wisniewski considering the appropriateness of traditional archival approaches for appraising moving images. Arguing that the positivistic model of evidential value poorly serves certain types of nonfiction film, he suggests that archivists consider a new approach to the appraisal of such moving image material, one that embraces the utter ambiguity of its values. Although many archivists cling to the concepts of neutrality and [End Page vii] objectivity in choosing which records to keep and which to discard, attempts to appraise moving images, particularly nonfiction genres such as industrial and educational films, resist such models, as their status as "records" is often contested. Arguing for an appraisal approach that bases selection on functional values—that is, how images have been created, used, described, and preserved—rather than evidential qualities, Wisniewski claims that

the same qualities that make ephemeral moving images fail as positivist records—bias, falseness, lack of authenticity—also make them valuable as records of the strategies and functions that give rise to their creation. Ephemeral moving images possess archival value precisely in their ephemerality...

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